- Guns are dangerous. But myths are dangerous, too.
Myths about guns are very dangerous, because they lead to bad laws. And
bad laws kill people.
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- "Don't tell me this bill will not make a difference,"
said President Clinton, who signed the Brady Bill into law.
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- Sorry. Even the federal government can't say it has
made a difference. The Centers for Disease Control did an extensive review
of various types of gun control: waiting periods, registration and
licensing, and bans on certain firearms. It found that the idea that gun
control laws have reduced violent crime is simply a myth.
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- I wanted to know why the laws weren't working, so I
asked the experts. "I'm not going in the store to buy no gun," said one
maximum-security inmate in New Jersey. "So, I could care less if they had
a background check or not."
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- "There's guns everywhere," said another inmate. "If
you got money, you can get a gun."
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- Talking to prisoners about guns emphasizes a few key
lessons. First, criminals don't obey the law. (That's why we call them
"criminals.") Second, no law can repeal the law of supply and demand. If
there's money to be made selling something, someone will sell it.
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- A study funded by the Department of Justice confirmed
what the prisoners said. Criminals buy their guns illegally and easily.
The study found that what felons fear most is not the police or the prison
system, but their fellow citizens, who might be armed. One inmate told me,
"When you gonna rob somebody you don't know, it makes it harder because
you don't know what to expect out of them."
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- What if it were legal in America for adults to carry
concealed weapons? I put that question to gun-control advocate Rev. Al
Sharpton. His eyes opened wide, and he said, "We'd be living in a state of
terror!"
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- In fact, it was a trick question. Most states now have
"right to carry" laws. And their people are not living in a state of
terror. Not one of those states reported an upsurge in crime.
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- Why? Because guns are used more than twice as often
defensively as criminally. When armed men broke into Susan Gonzalez' house
and shot her, she grabbed her husband's gun and started firing.
- "I figured if I could shoot one of them, even if we
both died, someone would know who had been in my home." She killed one of
the intruders. She lived. Studies on defensive use of guns find this kind
of thing happens at least 700,000 times a year.
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- And there's another myth, with a special risk of its
own. The myth has it that the Supreme Court, in a case called United
States v. Miller, interpreted the Second Amendment -- "A well regulated
Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the
people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" -- as conferring a
special privilege on the National Guard, and not as affirming an
individual right. In fact, what the court held is only that the right to
bear arms doesn't mean Congress can't prohibit certain kinds of guns that
aren't necessary for the common defense. Interestingly, federal law still
says every able-bodied American man from 17 to 44 is a member of the
United States militia.
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- What's the special risk? As Alex Kozinski, a federal
appeals judge and an immigrant from Eastern Europe, warned in 2003, "the
simple truth -- born of experience -- is that tyranny thrives best where
government need not fear the wrath of an armed people."
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- "The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines
the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do," Judge Kozinski noted.
"But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second
Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally
rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the
government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest;
where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to
enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem
today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only
once."
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